


Chime

by orithea



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 08:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orithea/pseuds/orithea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chimes are a reassurance: you are doing what you are meant to do; you have found your purpose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Jude’s prompt: clock; float; shadow; magical realism; not more than 500 words.
> 
> Well, I came close on the last bit.

There is a clock in the hallway. It has stood there as long as—and, presumably, long before—he has been alive, but Sherlock has never once heard it chime.

Mycroft hears it every hour, on the hour—has since he was nine, or so he says. He won’t explain to Sherlock what it _means_ , that he hears it; no one will. “You’ll know when it happens,” they tell him, and wink conspiratorially.

Until he went away to school himself, Sherlock thought that it was a game his family played, designed especially to annoy him. Keep a broken, old clock in the house, one that can’t make a sound, and mutually agree to pretend that it does.. But no, he starts to see it happening, one by one, to his peers. The school clocks are never exactly on time, but the ones who hear it are perfectly in sync, heads rising together in Maths at 11:57.

“Your classroom clock is off, ma’am,” one of them will say with a giggle. They all look around to see who else is in on the secret. Soon, it seems that Sherlock is the only one who isn’t.

“It’s like having a shadow,” Victor explains. “It’s just a part of you.”

“But what is it _for_?”

“You’ll understand when it happens. _If_ it happens. I hear that sometimes there are people who go their whole lives and never hear their clocks.” He says it slowly, lazily, never coming out of his tendency to drawl, even when giving a warning.

Sherlock doesn’t speak to him for weeks after.

\---

He is almost thirty before he hears the clock.

It’s raining and Sherlock is soaked through. That he really ought to get a better coat buzzes in the back of his mind, but his attention is focused on the crime scene before him. “You’re wrong, you know.”

He’s in the middle of explaining the misleading nature of the contusions around the corpse’s thighs when he hears it: a clock striking, simultaneously sounding as though from a distance ( _the miles between London and Home?_ ) but also right _there_ inside his head. Nineteen times.

They were right—he understands. It is like a soul’s reminder, a settling into place of himself. The chimes are a reassurance: you are doing what you are meant to do; you have found your purpose.

Lestrade is the only person in whom he confides this discovery. It is his pass to the work in the future.

\---

John Watson has just killed a man, for Sherlock. He is a doctor—surely it goes against his very purpose in life, but he did it anyway. _Interesting_.

They’re walking towards the restaurant when the hour ticks over. Twenty-four counts, drowning out his very thoughts. No hope of hearing what’s being said. He frowns in irritation.

But John—John looks startled.

“You didn’t expect..?” Sherlock studies him.

“No, not exactly.” John flushes, won’t meet his eye.

“First time?”

John nods.

“So you know what that means, for you?”

“Always thought it would start when I first decided to become a doctor. Then when I actually began to practice, or when I joined the army, or maybe even the first time I patched a man together, blood in the sand, but it never did.”

“And?” Sherlock knows the answer, is so elated he could float.

“And it just did, I suppose.” John smiles.


End file.
